Unsafe at Home and Vulnerable Abroad: The Struggle of Forgotten Myanmar Asylum Seekers and Migrants in Thailand Post-Coup D’état

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is a very important and interesting paper that needs to be published. It engaging and reads well.

In my view it needs some small revisions to make it publishable.

1. more careful copy editing (see comments below)
2. more rigour in its approach to the source material used
3. more discussion, and foregrounding?, of relevant legal instruments
4. some brief comment on the recent earthquake and how this might effect the issues raised in the paper.

The paper refers to the fact that Thailand has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention but has signed Conventions, and adopted customary law, prohibiting re-foulement to countries where they might face torture and other degrading punishment. This is very important and should perhaps be referred to earlier in the text? Returning people/refugees to Myanmar (and to other countries) is in almost certainly a violation of the principle of non-refoulement. Please give greater consideration to this and perhaps provide an explanation of why the significance of both these laws given that the paper is being submitted to a non-specialised journal.

More discussion of data sources is necessary - the authors have provided links to source material and have noted these difficulties in section 6 but I would suggest foregrounding the difficulty of collecting data and any effect this might have on reliability etc.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

In general the language used is fine but there are a few corrections to be made - 'detainments' - should be 'detention'

"which is nearly a significant portion of the population" line 64. Nearly? would be better to state the percentage is represents or just leave the number - 18.6m is a lot of people regardless of percentage.

line 221 "Myanmar seeking asylum and migrants" 

Author Response

Reviewer 1.

Thank you for your valuable feedback and for taking the time to review my manuscript.

 

Reviewer’s Comment	Author Reply
The paper refers to the fact that Thailand has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention but has signed Conventions, and adopted customary law, prohibiting re-foulement to countries where they might face torture and other degrading punishment. This is very important and should perhaps be referred to earlier in the text? Returning people/refugees to Myanmar (and to other countries) is in almost certainly a violation of the principle of non-refoulement.	I greatly appreciate it. I have expanded on the non-refoulement issue concerning Thailand in lines 140-145.
Please give greater consideration to this and perhaps provide an explanation of why the significance of both these laws given that the paper is being submitted to a non-specialised journal.	Thank you for your attention. This paper has been submitted to the special collection on international migration in the Journal of Social Sciences, published by MDPI.
More discussion of data sources is necessary - the authors have provided links to source material and have noted these difficulties in section 6 but I would suggest foregrounding the difficulty of collecting data and any effect this might have on reliability etc.	Thank you. I have expanded on the challenges of data collection and the rationale for utilizing media outlets or contemporary source analysis in Section 6.
Comments on the Quality of English Language In general, the language used is fine but there are a few corrections to be made - 'detainments' - should be 'detention'	Thank you.  I thoroughly reviewed the entire manuscript for any English spelling and grammar mistakes.
"which is nearly a significant portion of the population" line 64. Nearly? would be better to state the percentage is represents or just leave the number - 18.6m is a lot of people regardless of percentage.	Thank you. I took out " which represents almost a large segment of the population" from the sentence.
line 221 "Myanmar seeking asylum and migrants"	Thanks. I changed it to Myanmar asylum seekers and migrants.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In general, the paper presents a good overview of the challenges for people who have fled Myanmar to Thailand following the 2021 coup.  The paper identifies the significant policies in both Myanmar and Thailand that limit the protections available to Myanmar people from multiple backgrounds and impact their lives. The contributions of the paper include: showing how Myanmar's military government exerts its power and leverage over citizens even while they are living outside of the country through its ID/passport system; how Myanmar's military extracts unwilling support from its overseas citizens through taxation and remittance practices; how state to state agreements/relationships between Myanmar and Thailand relating to the regularisation of migrant workers by-pass the protection needs of those at risk of persecution and forced conscription; and how people are pushed into irregularity despite the policy initiatives to regularise them. The article could perhaps explicitly point to these contributions in the introduction and elsewhere as they will have relevance to readers with a broader interest in forced migration issues beyond Myanmar/Thailand. 

Throughout, the paper uses the language and analysis of human rights reports. This language and analysis could be better adapted to an academic publication. For example, rather than providing straight forward recommendations to the Thai government using 'should' 'need to' etc., the paper could analyse reasons for government practices or highlight inter-state or international contexts that give rise to the current policies and practices in Thailand. 

The paper could better tease out the ambiguity and overlap between different categories of asylum seeker, migrant worker, refugee etc. to set context for those not familiar with Thailand's protection landscape. For example it could show how binary legal categories do not encompass both the protection and socio-economic needs of people from Myanmar living in Thailand or reflect the demographic realities of the workforce. 

Both the introduction and the conclusion could be strengthened to highlight some of the original contributions that this article makes. This way it will read less like a summary of existing literature and will be more persuasive and coherent in its arguments. Finally, on a small point, the statistics used in the introduction and elsewhere could be better referenced. 

Author Response

Reviewer 2

Thank you for your valuable feedback and for taking the time to review my manuscript.

Reviewer’s Comment	Author Reply
The article could perhaps explicitly point to these contributions in the introduction and elsewhere as they will have relevance to readers with a broader interest in forced migration issues beyond Myanmar/Thailand.	I really appreciate it. I added this paragraph at the conclusion of the introduction.
Throughout, the paper uses the language and analysis of human rights reports. This language and analysis could be better adapted to an academic publication. For example, rather than providing straight forward recommendations to the Thai government using 'should' 'need to' etc., the paper could analyse reasons for government practices or highlight inter-state or international contexts that give rise to the current policies and practices in Thailand.	Thank you. I have conducted a thorough review of the manuscript and made revisions to ensure academic precision and coherence.
The paper could better tease out the ambiguity and overlap between different categories of asylum seeker, migrant worker, refugee etc. to set context for those not familiar with Thailand's protection landscape. For example, it could show how binary legal categories do not encompass both the protection and socio-economic needs of people from Myanmar living in Thailand or reflect the demographic realities of the workforce.	Thank you. I have detailed the various categories of asylum seekers, migrant workers, refugees, etc., in lines 130-144.
Both the introduction and the conclusion could be strengthened to highlight some of the original contributions that this article makes. This way it will read less like a summary of existing literature and will be more persuasive and coherent in its arguments. Finally, on a small point, the statistics used in the introduction and elsewhere could be better referenced.	Thank you very much. I have strengthened the introduction based on your original suggestions. Additionally, I have updated some statistics, including the recent earthquake in Myanmar.